Friday, October 31, 2014

CSEC reverts to CSE

Communications Security Establishment Canada, the spy agency that collects foreign security intelligence by combing the Internet and airwaves of the world, is dropping “Canada” from its name.

For old hands, CSE is the familiar handle. It was always hard to get used to C-S-E-C.

...

In an email titled, UNCLASSIFIED, the agency’s media relations office suggests nothing’s changed. Ryan Foreman says the legal title of the organization was, and is, CSE.

However, in 2007, along came instructions for every federal department and agency to comply with what was a stricter branding measure.

“Under the Federal Identity Program, which requires all federal departments and agencies to have the word ‘Canada’ as part of their corporate title, the word ‘Canada’ was added to create the agency’s applied title, the Communications Security Establishment Canada, or CSEC,” Foreman wrote.

He said the “applied” title is all that changed and the legal title remains Communications Security Establishment.

The change started to appear in the past six months, matching CSE’s URL, which had never changed to pick up the Canada word mark.

Judging from the earlier versions stored by the Internet Archive, the reversion to CSE began appearing on the agency's website at the beginning of August.

Ironically, it was only around January of this year that I finally gave up and starting consistently referring to the agency as CSEC instead of CSE. Oh well, I never liked the change anyway.

While we're at it, let's bring back the 291ers too. Even the Commander of CFIOG still calls the 00120 trade the 291 occupation (see page 9). Can we just forget that whole 00120 thing?